Joe Biden on Friday admitted that his oft-repeated story about being arrested in South Africa, while attempting to see the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, was not true.
Biden set the record straight during a meeting with South Africa's current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the White House on Friday.
Biden recounted meeting Mandela in 1990, and said the anti-apartheid leader thanked him for facing arrest in order to meet him in South Africa.
Biden told Ramaphosa that meeting Mandela was 'one of the great moments of my career.'
'I was a senator at the time, and we met in the Senate Foreign Relations executive committee room. And he came in we all stood there and said hello to him and the like and afterwards, he asked if he could come by my office and he came by to say thank you because he heard I had been stopped trying to get to visit him, to see him in prison.'
Biden then admitted he had never been arrested in South Africa.
'I wasn't arrested, I got stopped, prevented from moving.
'But he was extremely gracious.'
Biden is known for his exaggerations, and his contorted, misremembered stories.
The 79-year-old president, who joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee aged 32, and became its chair in 2001, has frequently spoken about his 'arrest' by the South African police.
On February 11, 2020, Biden told a South Carolina audience that he had been arrested in the African nation.
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